Academic skills: A concise guide to grant writing

We are pleased to offer another brief article for our series on Academic Skills. This series aims at providing short, concrete, and practical tips on how to conduct and improve your life in academia. Whether beginner or fully trained investigator, we share the same challenges in succeeding in our professions, challenges which schooling never prepared us for. Perhaps grant writing, the subject of this article, is the most mysterious, fear-provoking and misunderstood type of skill needed in our careers. In fact, for these reasons, some people have never dared adventure into grant writing. Yet, this activity is not only essential for running our research but also for other numerous purposes including training people, buying equipment, getting a job, and being granted tenure. The tips provided here are widely applicable if you are interested in writing a grant, regardless of your country of origin. Therefore, it is my hope that these tips increase your chances of success in grantmanship along with the satisfaction that may come from achieving all the goals that these funding aids make possible.